This week on the Pest and podcast, two huge questions.

Can this second wave of COVID-19 that's building across Europe be dampened?

Can it be suppressed?

And will there be a new president in the White House?

I'll be discussing this with the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland,

with the senior US Democrat Senator Dick Durbin,

and with Game of Thrones is John Snow Kit Harrington

also with me Labor's Rosie Duffield and Gavin Barwell the former Chief of

Staff to Theresa May first up Gavin Lord Barwell Gavin Lord Barwell Gavin if I could just start with you, how do you think tonight's developments?

We've got a lockdown, really severe lockdown in France, the whole of France, on the basis

of infection numbers, there's a roughly double where they are here.

But in Germany, we're also seeing a more severe lockdown than we've got in England on the basis

of infections that are roughly half where they are in the UK.

And we've seen in the spectator this what's known as a reasonable worst-case scenario, which

is a sort of planning scenario from the government scientist, which is telling us, you know,

we've got to prepare for a really bleak winter. And they were saying that on the basis of reasonable,

as I say, worst-case assumptions, we could be looking at 500 deaths a day

for months, and they're already well over 300 deaths a day. How do you think this will affect the

debate here? So I think it is going to increase the number of people who are going to argue

that we need to have tight restrictions in place,

at least in those parts of the country where infections are very high.

I think that whatever you do today, things are going to get worse for the next few weeks,

...